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"To brush history against the grain": toward a historiography of dialectical materialism and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dicteé

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Taking Cha's novel Dictě as a critical illustration, this study addresses some questions about the writing of history in search of a historiography that does not gloss over muffled stories of some in order to legitimize celebrated stories of others. In light of Walter Benjamin's theses on history, historicism or the Enlightenment notion of history is compared with historical materialism. The U.S. frontier thesis is taken as an example of historicist writing and performative repetition as an effective strategy of a materialist historiography. Dictě is a historical text that grapples with the tasks of historical materialism. Cha rips the particular history of modern Korea out of universal history, juxtaposes multiple stories of diverse individuals and of different dimensions, and envisions the twentieth-century history of Korea in a dynamic relationship with the world history for a future that does not repeat tragedies of the past. As such, this study argues for historical materialism as a useful mode of critical intervention in the complex cultural phenomena of the late capitalist world.

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Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-72).Issued also on microfiche from Lange Micrographics.